Nvu is a wonderful web authoring system for Linux that, for the most part, is on par with programs such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver. It supports css, tabs, support for forms, tables, and templates, direct editing of HTML code, and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing of pages. Unfortunately, Nvu 1.0 is a bit buggy, and the maintainer (Daniel Glazman) seems to have quite the chip on his shoulder. Having refused to fix any of the bugs after the 1.0 release (since he is working on the next generation editor called Composer), another person (Kaze) eventually forked the Nvu project and released an unofficial bug-fix release, called KompoZer. (If you wish to see the relationship between Nvu and KompoZer explained, see the link on Nvu's forum.) After a massive flame war, Glazman finally relented and invited Kaze to work on the source code directly. At least, that's the gist of it. Got to love the Linux world.
At any rate, I've used Nvu/KompoZer to author all of these web pages, and it is wonderful. In lieu of Composer taking forever to be developed, I strongly suggest that you do not download Nvu, but go directly to Kaze's site for KompoZer and download the bug-fix release. It can be found at:
Click on the Download tab, and look for the Linux i486 binary. Next click on the kompozer-0.7.10-gcc4.0.3-i486.tar.gz link, which will download a compressed binary executable.
Next, create an appropriate directory to install kompozer under /usr/local/src/kompozer:
~>
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/src/kompozer
Copy the binary tarball to the
directory: ~>
sudo cp ~/Download/kompozer-*.tgz /usr/local/src/kompozer/.
Change into the kompozer
directory: ~>
cd /usr/local/src/kompozer
and decompress the binary: ~>
sudo tar vfzx kompozer-*.tgz
Once the package has been
decompressed, delete the compressed binary file, and move the kompozer
directory to the current version: ~>
sudo rm kompozer-*.tgx
~> sudo mv kompozer kompozer-0.7.10
Now it is just a matter of
creating a link from the executable file in the kompozer-0.7.10
directory to /usr/local/bin:~> sudo mv kompozer kompozer-0.7.10
~>
sudo ln -s /usr/local/src/kompozer/kompozer-0.7.10/kompozer
/usr/local/bin/.
With the soft link created,
source your
~/.bashrc file: ~>
source ~/.bashrc
and you are ready to launch
and use kompozer: ~>
kompozer &
After you get a feel for it,
you will see how powerful
of a program it really is. It is far from perfect, but for a hack
like myself, it certainly gets the job done.